Additional Details

Allotment—the division of Native American reservations into individually-owned plots of land—has been extensively studied, yet there is still a lack of reservation-level studies at granular geospatial scales. In this study, we employed a GIS database of allotments at the Standing Rock Reservation to map and explore allotment patterns in detail. As anticipated, we discovered patterns of both gain and loss.
On the one hand, we found that the people at Standing Rock gained land through their insistence on allotments for married women and for children born after the beginning date of allotment (“later-born children”), land they otherwise would not have received. We also confirmed that married women only received half the land that their husbands received and that the early sale of “surplus” reservation lands deprived a future generation of the opportunity to receive their own land. Perhaps most importantly, we discovered that the belated timing of allotments to married women and later-born children caused their allotments to be located at some distance from those of their husbands or fathers, creating disjunct and dispersed patterns of family land holdings that would have significantly hampered the creation of viable farming and ranching operations.

About the speaker and co-author:

Steve Egbert is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science at KU. His main field of research and teaching focused on remote sensing, GPS, and aerial drone mapping, while in more recent years he has turned his attention to two additional areas of interest: the geographical and geopolitical aspects of genocide, and the impacts of the U.S. government policy of breaking up Native American reservation lands through allotment. His awards include the Kemper Fellowship in Teaching Excellence and the Byron A. Alexander Graduate Mentor Award.

Josh Meisel earned his B.A. degree at Haskell Indian Nations University and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at KU in the Department of Geography and Atmospheric Science. His M.A. thesis, “Historical Demographics, Student Origins, and Recruitment at Off-Reservation Indian Boarding Schools, 1900,” received the best master’s thesis of the year award at KU. Josh has taught numerous courses and workshops in GIS, remote sensing, and cartography, and served as a GIS instructor at Haskell Indian Nations University. He is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.